What Is Belief? : Part One

Have you ever had someone ask you a question to which you answered, “I believe so,” if you are not sure? Belief is a very powerful word but it is a confusing word as well. When someone says s/he has faith, they are saying that they believe something or have embraced faith in some sense. The word belief and the word faith mean exactly the same thing. The difference is that in 43 AD, two languages were forced to merge into one. It is fairly certain that our word faith came from the Latin fides. The etymology of “faith” is fairly clear; “belief,” however, is a different matter. Most etymologist think it came from Anglo-Saxon influences, with some Latin influences after the Roman conquest of Britain in 43 AD. Evidence from early and modern Welsh shows some influence from the Roman period, but nothing is not so clear concerning the word “belief.” There is is a plethora of terms thought to be the source of the modern English “believe.” They run from: bileave, "confidence," replacing Old English geleaf belief, faith," from West Germanic ga-laubon" to hold dear, esteem, trust,” Old Saxon gilobo,m. The Common Brittonic, the language of Brittian, was a Celtic language spoken in Ancient Britain. By the sixth century AD, the tongues of the Celts were showing an influence from the languages of conquering cultures. Anglo-Saxon, was spoken and written in England before 1100 AD; it is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. The Celtic language was spoken in Britain, Ireland, and Scotland, until Gaelic was brought to Scotland from Ireland. The etymology data above was drawn from https://www.etymonline.com/word/believe.

One could think that there is no hope of knowing the origin of the word “belief” or its verb/participle form, “believing.” But what the words belief and faith came to mean in the development of the British Isles is a moot issue. Our concern is what belief and faith meant in the Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. Following the Roman period in Britain in 410 AD, came the development of Christianity after the shown favor by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in the early part of the fourth century A.D. Faith and belief became first cousins and this created a problem for some, especially the translators of the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 AD. The original copies of the New Testament were written in Greek where faith and/or belief had to be used to translate the Greek word pistes into English for the people of 16th and 17th centuries England. Both terms “belief” and “faith” were the English translations of the Hebrew, emunah as appears in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Greek pitstis as appears in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Old Testament in the Greek, and then there’s the English translation of “faith” or “belief” in the Greek New Testament. Now, having addressed the problem of the origins of faith in ancient and current usage we need to move on to a more involved discussion of the meaning of faith and belief. My interest in this matter has to do with how these words are to be understood in the New Testament. I will delve into this matter in the next posting.

(a 2nd Article will follow)